What happens to your medical care when a hurricane hits

When a hurricane forces an evacuation, the storm is not the only thing that disrupts your care. The home health and support services you rely on get interrupted, and doctor's offices close, some of them for good. Angela Johnson, an internal medicine physician who has helped run one of Louisiana's largest medical special needs shelters since Katrina, explains what happens to patients who cannot leave on their own, and what to do before the next warning.

⏱️ Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:28 The struggles behind the happy-go-lucky reputation
2:38 Why hurricane season counts as a fifth season
4:03 Where patients go when they cannot evacuate alone
5:09 Why disaster care sends you back to the basics
7:05 The patients who need a plug more than a prescription
8:46 The training that actually prepares you for a shelter
10:40 Why shelter medicine is not the chaos it looks like
11:14 The hardest part starts after the storm passes
13:11 When the doctor's office never reopens
14:11 What worries her more than the number of storms
15:38 What to do before you are told to evacuate
17:14 The plan your home health company is supposed to have
18:53 Take home messages

About this episode:
Angela Johnson is an internal medicine physician in South Louisiana and a member of the American College of Physicians Board of Regents. She has spent 25 years treating patients through hurricane season. In her KevinMD article, "Physicians and natural disasters: the fifth season," she argues that hurricane season works as a fifth season for coastal clinicians, one that reshapes planning every June. She describes the Medical Special Needs Shelter Network, where evacuees who cannot use general population shelters are cared for in athletic facilities without exam rooms, privacy, or electronic records. The patients who arrive there share two things: a barrier to evacuating anywhere else, and a medical need they cannot meet alone. That need may be mobility, refrigerated medication, or simply a place to plug in an oxygen concentrator. Johnson explains why triage skill and comfort with uncertainty matter more than any one specialty, and why the shelters run on an incident command structure borrowed from the military. She is candid that the harder work begins after the storm, when getting people home depends on whether the water, the power, and the doctor's offices have come back. What worries her is the intensity of storms, not just the count. Her closing argument is that disasters magnify disparities that already existed, and that the work of fixing them happens between the storms.

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#HurricaneSeason #DisasterPreparedness #InternalMedicine